Bloomberg Names Housing Recovery Chief Amid Storm Warning

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said, “The really damaged communities have a lower threshold to sustain damage from this storm and should have a lower threshold for evacuation. Take evacuation orders seriously, please, please, please.” Photographer: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) -- With temperatures near freezing and
thousands displaced by superstorm Sandy, New York Mayor Michael
Bloomberg put a former federal emergency official in charge of
the city’s housing response, just as a new storm threatened to
bring gale-force winds, rain and coastal flooding.

For the second time in little over a week, with 1.4 million
homes and businesses in seven states still without power and
damage and debris widespread, evacuations are again being
considered, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said yesterday.

“The really damaged communities have a lower threshold to
sustain damage from this storm and should have a lower threshold
for evacuation,” the 54-year-old Democrat said. “Take
evacuation orders seriously, please, please, please.”

Cuomo said he ordered insurers to accept homeowners’ photos
and videos of damage, rather than wait for an on-site inspection
by a claims adjuster, so debris can be cleared before the new
storm turns it into projectiles, he said. “Dangerously
fragile” homes may have to be destroyed, he said.

In New York City, Bloomberg said thousands of people, at
least half of them living in public housing, may need shelter as
power remains out in many areas. The mayor, who on Nov. 4
estimated the number might be as high as 40,000, said yesterday
that was a worst-case scenario. “I think it’s down,” he said,
perhaps to “something less” than 10,000.

About 35,000 people in 174 New York City Housing Authority
buildings still need heat and hot water, Bloomberg said.

Recovery Officer

The mayor named Brad Gair, 52, who served as recovery
officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the
Sept. 11 attacks, as director of housing-recovery operations.
The mayor also appointed four directors to serve as the primary
points of contact for residents, community groups and elected
officials in the hardest-hit communities.

“When we get down to the hard core of real problems, when
there is no quick, easy, inexpensive fix, that’s when we’re
really going to be challenged,” the mayor said yesterday in a
news briefing at Public School 195 in Manhattan Beach in
Brooklyn. “I’ve put in place people to ensure that that doesn’t
happen, because that’s my great fear.”

The National Weather Service said the new storm may bring
wind gusts of as much as 60 miles (97 kilometers) per hour and
drive a tidal surge up to four feet above normal.

Coastal Flooding

New Jersey’s coast is likely to experience “moderate”
flooding, Gary Szatkowski, a National Weather Service
meteorologist, said in a written briefing yesterday. The storm
is also likely to cause moderate to severe beach erosion, he
said.

Sandy, the biggest Atlantic storm in history, raked the
region with winds of as much as 100 miles an hour. Its tidal
surge of more than 13 feet inundated transit tunnels and
underground utilities, destroyed homes and chewed away natural
barriers such as beaches.

In the first day of classes since Oct. 26, about 94 percent
of New York City schools were open yesterday. About 86 percent
of pupils in the nation’s largest public school district
attended, the mayor said at a briefing in Brooklyn.

While most of the city’s subway lines were running
yesterday, according to the Metropolitan Transportation
Authority’s website, traffic jams and congested transit plagued
many morning commutes.

NJ Transit “is still several weeks away from full service
restoration,” according to a statement. Additional buses,
temporary park-and-ride facilities and ferries were offered to
help fill the gap after the destruction of 80 percent of its
infrastructure, the service said.

$150 Taxis

The loss of public transit created costs and aggravations
for commuters such as Sarah Konecny, 25. Her North Coast train
commute from her home in Woodbridge, New Jersey, to her job
managing Greene Street, a shop in Red Bank, normally takes 30
minutes and costs $14, she said. Konecny said she’s spending
$150 round-trip to take taxis that arrive hours after she calls.

“I’m paying $150 a day but I have to get back to work,”
she said as she folded a shirt and counted inventory at the
store yesterday. “I’ve just been taking cabs every day since
Friday. That’s the only way to get here.”

People displaced from their homes faced more hardships.

Francisco Sanchez, 34, is sleeping at a New York City
shelter at John Jay High School in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. A tree
fell on the house in Bushwick where he lived with his
girlfriend, Jessie Perez, in a one-bedroom basement apartment
for which they paid $175 a week. When he returned to the house,
they found the basement was flooded and their clothes ruined
with a mixture of water, mud and sewage.

Sanchez works as a book binder, making schoolbooks. It
doesn’t pay well, he said.

No Money

“I’m tight with cash,” he said in a coffee shop across
the street from the shelter, and he paid his last month’s rent
in advance, $700 he wished he had now. “Me and my girlfriend
ain’t got no place to live.”

He says the shelter won’t let unmarried couples stay
together. “The next step for us, we be in the street,” he
said.

While many privately owned apartment buildings and
residences have sprung back to life, public housing, such as the
Red Hook Houses near Brooklyn’s waterfront, are still in
shambles.

Carolyn Bonilla held back sobs as she descended an unlit,
garbage-strewn staircase there. Housing Authority crews pumped
out the basement with a small hose. Every time they emptied it,
the basement filled again with groundwater from the saturated
soil. Bonilla said she’d had enough of life on the 12th floor
without power or running water.

‘Decent People’

“I can’t do this no more,” said Bonilla, 44, a cosmetics
saleswoman at Macy’s. “We are decent people, we are working
people. I am being treated like an animal. I have no water, no
lights. I have nothing.”

Across the bay in New Jersey, about 765,000 homes and
businesses remained without power yesterday, said Mary Goepfert,
a spokeswoman for the Office of Emergency Management. That’s
after Sandy blacked out 2.7 million, or more than half the
state. Shelters housed 5,048 people.

At Belmar Borough Hall, where residents can pick up meals
and clothes and charge their mobile phones, Jennifer Haverstick,
56, perused the offerings of packaged cheese tortellini and beef
stew.

“It’s like Boy Scout camping,” she said.

Governor Chris Christie said he will “continue to use my
type of gentle persuasion” to prod utilities. “It’s not going
to mean a damned thing to you unless your power’s on -- I get
it,” Christie, 50, told reporters in Hoboken yesterday.

Flooded Out

Annabelle Banks returned to her home of four decades in
Ventnor City, on a barrier island south of Atlantic City, to
find flood waters had ripped through the first floor. She’s
staying in a hotel arranged by the FEMA for the next seven days.

“This is really all I have in life at this point,” said
Banks, 67. “I am going to try to hold on, but it’s going to be
a long fix.”

More than 234,000 storm victims have registered for
assistance and more than $210 million in aide has been approved,
U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan
said yesterday in a statement. About 34,000 New York and New
Jersey residents have been judged eligible for lodging in hotels
and motels, he said.

Slow Restoration

The new storm may slow power restoration, said John Miksad,
senior vice president of electric operations at Consolidated
Edison Inc. About 950,000 Con Ed customers lost power. About
115,000 in New York City remained without electricity at midday
yesterday, most in hardest-hit Staten Island, South Brooklyn and
the Rockaways neighborhood in Queens, Bloomberg said.

On Long Island, about 211,000 customers were without power,
down from 970,000, according to the Long Island Power
Authority’s website. The utility said it expects that 90 percent
of customers will have power by tomorrow.

The arrival of colder weather with so many residents still
blacked out “is the next big problem for us,” said Bloomberg,
who is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent
Bloomberg LP.

Emergency workers were distributing blankets along with
food and water, and police patrols used loudspeakers to urge
people to go where they could be warm and safe, he said. The
Salvation Army is assisting recovery efforts from shelters and
mobile feeding canteens throughout the East Coast.

Election Changes

Preparing for the presidential election today, the city
Elections Board announced the relocation of 60 flood-damaged
polling places to new sites, affecting some 143,000 registered
voters.

Free shuttle buses will operate on State Island, in Coney
Island and in the Rockaways to take voters to the alternative
polls, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said yesterday
in a statement.

“Will there be some hardships to get to the polls? Yes,”
Cuomo said yesterday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“Compared with what people have been dealing with the last
week, the hardship they’ll have at the polls is nothing.”